India Pakistan Research Articles

India–Pakistan Relations: Efficacy of Culture

In the international relations, culture has been described as the most important component of a nation’s soft power. Today more than the coercive approach, promotion of a country’s cultural image (soft power) is gaining added popularity and acceptance in the larger international arena. India and Pakistan have originated from a common subcontinent but after the partition of 1947, they have an unstable relationship due to many unresolved issues. Although the two South Asian neighbours share a common history, literature and a strong cultural bond, they have time and again focused on the differences rather than making peace based on the similarities. Because the cost of conflict between India and Pakistan is very high, both countries have tried to find a common ground and reap the benefits of peace through bilateral dialogues and agreements. In such a situation, there is a great possibility of ‘culture’ playing a role as a connecting link between the two nations sans coercion and threat. In this context, this paper highlights the role of theatre in the India–Pakistan relations and its significance as a tool of diplomacy. It emphasizes the need for an increase in cultural contact between the two countries to gain mutual trust and reach a peaceful co-existence. In the backdrop of mistrust and political imbroglio between India and Pakistan at the official level, this study put forth the point that cultural diplomacy, especially theatre, can be an alternate medium for improving people-to-people contact and peace building between the two countries.

India’s Decision Making on Cross-Border Natural Gas Pipelines (1989–2012)

In the last two decades, cross-border gas pipelines have become an integral part of discourse on India’s energy security. Successive reports from the government and the private sector have envisaged an important role for cross-border gas pipeline projects in India. After engaging in negotiations for several years, the Indian Government finally joined the Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India (TAPI) gas pipeline over the Iran–Pakistan–India pipeline (IPI) and the Myanmar–Bangladesh–India pipeline (MBI). Several critics of this project have questioned this decision of the Indian Government to join TAPI due to the huge levels of risks involved and the project’s commercial unviability. The article is an attempt to understand the decision-making process of the Indian Government on cross-border gas pipeline projects and its rationale for choosing a seemingly riskier project like the TAPI pipeline and letting go of the other two pipeline projects. The article makes an attempt to conduct a detailed discussion around such factors that contributed to India’s decision making on these projects.

Two new whiprays, Maculabatis arabica sp. nov. and M. bineeshi sp. nov.(Myliobatiformes: Dasyatidae), from the northern Indian Ocean.

Two new medium-sized whiprays, Maculabatis arabica sp. nov. and M. bineeshi sp. nov., are described from specimens collected in coastal habitats of the northern Indian Ocean, off India and Pakistan. Both species superficially resemble M. randalli (Last, Manjaji-Matsumoto & Moore), and appear to have been confused with a more widely distributed whipray M. gerrardi Gray, and another undescribed species from the Indian Ocean. Maculabatis arabica sp. nov. (attains at least 63 cm DW) is diagnosed by a combination of external characters, i.e. morphometrics (e.g. relatively short disc, narrow interspaces between paired structures on the head), squamation (relatively slow denticle development and a characteristic denticle band shape), plain dorsal disc coloration (rather than spotted), and tail light brown and banded beyond the caudal sting in juveniles but almost plain in adults. Maculabatis bineeshi sp. nov. (attains at least 66 cm DW) is diagnosed by a combination of characters, i.e. morphometrics (e.g. suboval to weakly rhombic disc in young), squamation (rapid denticle development and broad denticle band with margins truncate near pectoral-fin insertions), plain dorsal disc coloration (no white spots), and a dark blackish tail (especially in young) with weakly mottled banding on its dorsal surface beyond the caudal sting. Maculabatis arabica sp. nov. appears to be confined to the Arabian Sea (from Pakistan to western India), whereas M. bineeshi sp. nov. occurs in the Arabian Sea (off Pakistan and northwestern India) and in the Bay of Bengal (confirmed off Odisha, eastern India).

Battles for the Golden Grain: Paddy Soldiers and the Making of the Northeast India–East Pakistan Border, 1930–1970

AbstractThis essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants andadivasis, as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobileadivasis, and between cultivation and soldiering.

The Making of the India–Pakistan Dynamic: Nehru, Liaquat, and the No War Pact correspondence of 1950

AbstractIn January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the ‘No War Pact’ correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise. Although much of the existing literature on India–Pakistan relations characterizes it as locked in acrimony and conflict, which arose from the bitterness of partition, a closer scrutiny reveals a more nuanced picture. Attempts at cooperation and dialogue between the two governments—and the rationale for undertaking them—complicate our understanding of a relationship apparently limited to instinctive antagonism, and help in creating a more rounded picture of the India–Pakistan dynamic.

Ideology, territorial saliency, and geographic contiguity: the beginning of India–Pakistan rivalry

Ideology, territorial saliency, and geographic contiguity: the beginning of India–Pakistan rivalry

Keeping an eye on South Asian skies: America’s pivotal deterrence in nuclearized India–Pakistan crises

ABSTRACTSince declaring their nuclear weapons capabilities in 1998, India and Pakistan have engaged in three major crises that each threatened to escalate into war. In each crisis, the USA engaged in active diplomacy to dissuade the South Asian rivals from taking escalatory actions. Previous literature on the crises has described the American role, but has not theorized third-party involvement in a nuclearized regional rivalry. We apply Timothy Crawford’s pivotal deterrence theory to the nuclearized India–Pakistan conflict, and extend the original theory to cover the novel condition of a non-superpower nuclear dyad, in the context of a single-superpower international system. We find that America’s pivotal deterrence generally enhanced stability in the India–Pakistan crises, and unlike in pre-nuclear South Asia, other great powers supported American diplomacy. However, we suggest that future regional crises between nuclear rivals, in South Asia or elsewhere, may present greater challenges for pivotal deterrence.

Paper Rights: The Emergence of Documentary Identities in Post-Colonial India, 1950–67

ABSTRACTThis essay contextualises the emergence of a document regime which regulated routine travel through the deployment of the India–Pakistan Passport and Visa Scheme in 1952. It suggests that such travel documents were useful for the new Indian state to delineate citizenship and the nationality of migrants and individual travellers from Pakistan. The bureaucratic and legal mediations under the Scheme helped the Indian state to frame itself before its new citizens as the sole certifier of some of their rights as Indians. In contrast, applicants for these documents viewed them as utilitarian, meant to facilitate their travel across the new borders. The contrast and contestation between such different perceptions helps us to understand the continued significance of documentary identities in contemporary India.

Venkat Dhulipala.Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India.

Venkat Dhulipala.<i>Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India</i>.

Nuclear doctrines and stable strategic relationships: the case of south Asia

This article offers a discussion of nuclear doctrines and their significance for war, peace and stability between nuclear-armed states. The cases of India and Pakistan are analysed to show the challenges these states have faced in articulating and implementing a proper nuclear doctrine, and the implications of this for nuclear stability in the region. We argue that both the Indian and Pakistani doctrines and postures are problematic from a regional security perspective because they are either ambiguous about how to address crucial deterrence related issues, and/or demonstrate a severe mismatch between the security problems and goals they are designed to deal with, and the doctrines that conceptualize and operationalize the role of nuclear weapons in grand strategy. Consequently, as both India's and Pakistan's nuclear doctrines and postures evolve, the risks of a spiralling nuclear arms race in the subcontinent are likely to increase without a reassessment of doctrinal issues in New Delhi and Islamabad. A case is made for more clarity and less ambition from both sides in reconceptualizing their nuclear doctrines. We conclude, however, that owing to the contrasting barriers to doctrinal reorientation in each country, the likelihood of such changes being made—and the ease with which they can be made—is greater in India than in Pakistan.

East and South Asia: Managing Difficult Bilateral Relations and Regional Integration Globally

This paper analyzes the economic integration of the East and South Asian economies in the global economy. East Asian economies are shown to be achieving much more of their potential trade than South Asian economies, both in terms of intra‐regional trade and in trade with the rest of the world. Examination of the China–Japan, India–Pakistan and Taiwan–mainland China bilateral relationships shows that integration of these economies into the global economy has allowed economic relations to dominate and constrain difficult bilateral political relations in East Asia while in South Asia adverse political relations have hampered development of bilateral economic relationships.

Unpacking Public Preference for Increasing Defence Expenditure in India

This article will examine public preference for increasing defence expenditure in India. It will be argued that the following aspects have a bearing on people’s opinion about defence expenditure: religiosity; people’s opinion regarding war being the solution to the India–Pakistan conflict; people’s opinion about India’s global image; and people’s federal location in India pertaining to whether or not they live in areas which have experienced the presence of the army for protracted periods of time.

The elephant and the tiger: Energy security, geopolitics, and national strategy in China and India’s cross border gas pipelines

China and India—the two large expanding economies of the world—being not endowed with enough oil and gas, are heavily relying on imports to sustain their growth. The physical proximity of both these countries makes them deal with some of the oil/gas rich countries in their common neighborhood to secure energy through pipelines. This paper outlines consumer countries’ measures towards supplier and transit countries in economic, political, and social dimensions. It compares the approaches of China and India in terms of their investments, bilateral trade, political interference, level of strategic partnerships, and social and cultural linkages with the supplier and transit countries. Contrasting China’s two operational projects—Central Asia–China and Myanmar–China gas pipelines, with India’s two comparable proposals—Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India and Myanmar–Bangladesh–India gas pipelines, it gives rationale of China’s success and India’s lack of it in materializing these projects. The paper indicates policy gaps for both countries, particularly for India, in speedy realization of stalled projects and smooth functioning of ongoing ones. This study can be instrumental in providing a guideline of the measures a consumer country must undertake as part of its national strategy in supplier and transit countries to achieve energy security and geopolitical advantage.

South Asia's Missile Expansion

ABSTRACTOver the past decade, contrary to declarations that they are pursuing “minimum” deterrence, India and Pakistan have considerably expanded their missile forces. India has developed eleven types of missiles while Pakistan has fielded nine. These missile forces have a mixed impact on deterrence stability. Both states' medium-range missiles strengthen their countervalue deterrent capabilities against the other, though India's China-specific missiles still have limitations. India's and Pakistan's short-range missiles and first-generation naval systems raise concerns about nuclear ambiguity, command and control, and escalation across the nuclear threshold, ultimately undermining deterrence stability on the subcontinent.

Memory, nation and the crisis of location in Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’

Abstract This article explores the entanglements of memory and the crisis of location in the context of the India–Pakistan Partition in 1947, as depicted in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short fiction. It will investigate how Manto’s fiction is reflective of the trauma of geographical and existential dislocation with the birth of two nations following a programme of political and epistemic violence and remapping. The study will place special focus on the entanglement of memory and madness alongside the broader issues of nation-formation, alienation and loss. It will examine the trauma of 1947 Partition as a psychological as well as existential crisis that often manifested itself in madness, aphasia and amnesia. With a special attention to the formal qualities of Manto’s short fiction, the article will investigate the human condition of shock and loss by drawing on trauma studies, phenomenology and cognitive psychological studies in episodic memory, unreliable narration and cognition. It will thus examine how the short story is formally and uniquely equipped to reflect the cognitive and phenomenological processes underpinning memory, narrativity and consciousness, especially in their unsettled states of being in a politically violent space. The article specifically focuses on the short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, which depicts a diplomatically agreed exchange of madmen across the borders of the two newly formed nations of India and Pakistan and the absurdity in the systematized political processes underpinning citizenship, nationality and identity. It will investigate how madness emerges as an existential as well as an epistemic inwardness that resists political classification with its subversive articulation of agency and emotionality. Manto’s short story and fiction in general may be read as a complex analysis of transnational trauma, memory and crisis of existential identity. This article offers such a study.

Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India's Partition

In Home, Uprooted, Devika Chawla combines personal/familial experiences with oral histories from refugees of the India–Pakistan Partition to offer compelling accounts of how people perform “home” a...

Condemned to Eternal Confrontation? Beyond the Indo-Pakistani Nuclear Conundrum

The inability of the South Asian nuclear rivals to resolve their disputes is more than a tragic failure. Their nuclear weaponry changes the nature of their disputes and makes them a global concern. The three books reviewed here stress different aspects of the India–Pakistan nuclear challenge and reveal a new wave of creativity in assessments of the causes and most promising solutions to restraining regional nuclear dangers. They do not advocate the subcontinent's denuclearization, but they make an important contribution to our understanding of the India–Pakistan nuclear conundrum, a prerequisite to bring South Asia's nuclear arms control back to the international agenda. All agree that solutions must be based on domestic willingness, but they see vital roles for elevated international pressure. Cohen and Riedel examine the potential role of China in the settlement of Indo-Pakistani disputes, and all agree that China's nuclear and missile assistance to Pakistan has had a negative impact on Indo-Pakistani relations. They all show growing interest in rethinking United States policy toward South Asia, looking at the region as a whole and integrating China into the picture, in order to adopt a comprehensive regional strategy to prevent a nuclear Armageddon in South Asia.

Tangible–Intangible Factors Interaction on Hostility Escalation and Rivalry Endurance: The Case of India–Pakistan Rivalry

A major contribution of the enduring rivalry literature is that the same pair of states—commonly referred to as dyads—are the cause for the majority of violent territorial changes and low-intensity conflicts. Enduring rivalries account for almost half of the militarized disputes during the past 200 years. Expanding literature on enduring rivalries informs us that militarized disputes and crises are influenced by past outcomes, internal dynamics of conflict behaviour and the prospects of future disputes. This article focuses on the India–Pakistan enduring rivalry, which has persisted for 68 years, and this rivalry is marked by four wars, and numerous instances of asymmetric warfare. The India–Pakistan rivalry has proved to be the most enduring, and it simply does not show any sign of abatement, and this conflict has become nested within the Pakistan–Afghanistan and India–China regional rivalry and territorial dispute. In addition, the India–Pakistan enduring rivalry has also become deeply enmeshed in the American-led Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). This article reviews the vast literature on enduring rivalry with particular focus on India–Pakistan to examine what factors have led to the persistence and exacerbation of this rivalry and why it is displaying no inclination towards termination.

Afghanistan's India–Pakistan dilemma: advocacy coalitions in weak states

This article seeks to examine the foreign policy behaviour of weak states in regions marked by politically turbulent geostrategic environments. An analysis of Afghanistan's foreign policy behaviour vis-à-vis Pakistan and India lends focus to this aim. India–Pakistan rivalry has gained traction as a key factor in determining Afghanistan's stability in the wake of the drawdown of Coalition forces. Missing from this debate, however, is consideration of Afghanistan's agency as a weak state with an independent set of policy preferences. Based on primary interviews with a diverse set of Afghan political actors the article outlines two competing policy advocacies: Pakistan friendly and Pakistan averse. The article argues that these advocacies are key to understanding Afghanistan's India–Pakistan dilemma. Departing from the ethnic lens used to explain Afghan politics and its regional linkages, this article shows that Kabul's relations with Islamabad determine its approach towards New Delhi regardless of ethnic rivalries. Understanding domestic Afghan narratives in this regional context is therefore imperative to adequately assess South Asia's prospective security calculus.

Contemporary Religious Fundamentalism

Religious fundamentalism in the South Asian region has assumed serious proportions in the last few decades. Sri Lanka, India Pakistan and to some extent Bangladesh face this problem. It is therefore necessary to examine this problem in detail.The question that crops up is what is religious fundamentalism? Why does it get aggravated so as to express itself violently. At the same time the difference between ethnicity and religious fundamentalism too should be clarified. Thus we first come to the issue of ethnicity. Ethnicity, anthropologists and Sociologists maintain, is a feeling of primordial identity with one’s social religious, linguistic or cultural group.